Okay, okay, Slippy is Probably in Love

 

I don't know if I know what to say sometimes I lie here in the grass with the sun pulsing like MR's hands petting me smoothing my fur down pressing her hands against my heart it races in the heat instead of being languid which means slow as in under water maybe and it's what warm hearts are supposed to do slow down but instead mine moves faster maybe at the speed of electromagnetic rays maybe ultraviolet which is also a color perhaps the colors inside my dreams filling my lungs with heat and the smell of grass.

Sometimes I read Sappho I like the book Sappho: Poems and Fragments translated by Stanley Lombardo and all the Sappho poems I talk about for this bloggy thingy today are from that book which is a beautiful book to make you cry if you like that I think you should read it.

Because I love the smell of grass and the feel of warm warm warm and even if I am here alone Outside lying down and even if I'm alone here sometimes with no one to talk to not even Lucy and even if no one ever wants to talk to me again still my heart will be racing at the heat of everything trying to burrow down into the dirt get closer to magma-hot beneath all-everything you want to come over some time and hang out with me? I can tell you what I think about things and you can tell me what you think about things too if you want to but not if you don't I don't want to be a bully like Luco is I want to be a nice dog not a mean dog if you know how mean a dog can be you should know I don't want to be that.

Listen. Have you met the Scarecrow Lucy the dog? If you did meet her you'd wonder how you could never have not met her before which is more than a double negative but I don't care about that I try to care about grammar but grammar is so tedious which means like when I have to sit and wait for MR to throw me a treat and she takes forever to do it! All I want is more more more meat in my mouth!

But Lucy the Scarecrow has black eyes that are also golden and they are warm and they are sweet. Her eyes are like burning constellations which is maybe why the heat races my heart like a crazy whirlwind jet engine I wish I could live inside of them and just sleep sleep with her all-every around me cradling soft she is usually close by to me but I think never quite close enough.

I said it before but it's what I mean I want to clamber into her body and live there there is close to her but never close enough there is talking to her but never talking enough there is telling her she is beautiful but I never say it enough or correctly or exactly how I mean to want to need to.

She is elysian fields. I've been reading Sappho and she is every-all-any Sappho ever wrote about:

I do not expect my fingers

to graze the sky

What would the rest of that fragment read probably something like but when I look at you Lucy clouds stick to my fingers spiderwebs.

And Sappho also writes this fragment it is for Lucy it must be for Lucy for my Scarecrow the Scarecrow of my heart:

and I long and yearn

These fragments make me sad they are so small and incomplete and but they also reach what I want to say to her the heat welling in my heart and spilling over for her for her for her pooling at my feet even hotter probably than the magma I dig for in the earth's liquid center.

 Eros has shaken my mind,

wind sweeping down the mountain on oaks

Oh Sappho of ancient Greece oh Sappho of so many years before I came to be how is it you clearly know my truest my sincerest my longingest longings for the doggy of my dreams who when I dream I always dream of Lucy Lucy and who when I close my eyes it's her eyes I see shining in the dark golden beacon and who I make myself a fool for loving who I never loved so much before and her delicate bones I search her body for answers already embedded there her genes must match mine line up like algebra. 

earth embroidered with flowers

When I see my Lucy Lu when I fall down hot onto the grass and roll swimming in sunshine.

Eros once more limbslackener makes me shudder

sweetbitter irresistble creeping

Oh Lucy Lucy who echoes in my heart in my skeleton who is electricity who is molecules and particles who is atoms and clouds and who is the atmosphere and every fizzing thing Lucy who is my Scarecrow who keeps nightmares from me who sleeps me gentle who I love and love is not enough of a word for my stumbling tongue who is my fire is my truth is my every.

fairest of stars

Oh that dog of mine.

Fremlin's Translation of Life

I'm a particle of dust. Mote suspended.

The words I speak, the searching glances - all for nothing. No one listens. No one bends close to me. It should probably depress me, but it doesn't, not really. I've gotten used to this kind of thing.

"Move over, Fremlin, and let the dog lie in the sun," they say. I oblige because I always oblige. A domesticated feline if ever there was one.

And yet, sometimes when I lose myself in Mingus' golden eyes my bones become more brittle, my stomach quivers, and I clench my teeth to think of all that I could've had. I wonder if I pine for freedom in some still place, my liver, for example, or if folded into my kidney some wild beating thing persists.

Maybe there's a part of me that whispers back at the dark shapes forming around me.

Maybe I want more than I let myself know.

Or maybe I'm an old lady, prone to daydreams, ill with daydreams even. I say I love Mingus, but do I? Do I even know him, or is it for an avatar of him that I grow heartsick and more heartsick still? A Mingus I've created from deepest recesses - and, but does it matter?

Would MR throw open the door for me as she does Alfie if I could better enumerate my despair? A list of loss:

1) I am old and no one remembers to touch me.
2) They-that-would-ignore-me make mock of me if I ever so much as gesture toward them.
3) Food tastes of laminate and nothing else.
4) The walls of this house, seemingly more a prison with every sunrise, press in against me.
5) My face forgettable; lamentable the hours I've spent mirror-staring, hoping to glean from my reflection some refraction of worth.

And if she did the door open, would I have the courage to walk Outside?

In my frenzied dreams I am more than mote, I'm burst-open spoke of light striking through glass. What wildness stalks my DNA? What tucked into meaty membrane pulses with ambition?

Am I to old to experience these emotions? Do I summon them; sorcerer-cat dictating desire to writhe forth from the mire-that-is-my-truest-heart?

how can anyone

knowing the cool of raindrop

seek out that which burns

and burns through single leaf note

book words edged to ash struggle

form flowers of ash

form snowflakes of white-as-death

that whirl as they fall

I call myself domesticated who is not tamed.

Oh, but I am. Who am I trying to fool here? Myself, surely. You're probably wondering why I even bother to question my place. Why I'd lift my eyes to the sun.

That mirror will never shine back to me beauty. In it I will never glimpse love. But I keep looking, searching. I keep dreaming myself into stories where I don't belong.

Would that I could quit this. Lie on the couch. Struggle with dreams. Lean my face into MR's palm. Would I were calmer, even-tempered, easy with confinement.

And I am sometimes. I know this.

But stormy days such as these move me, lightning-strike into my breast a fire.

A fire that will not be slaked.

Mingus is Bummed

It has been a long day.

A long day for me, for the lizards I chased and didn't catch. For the barking dogs who won't ever, oh my god, stop barking. For Luco, who hides in the laundry room because the air conditioner fixing guy is here, ostensibly fixing the air conditioner. For MR who who feeds me, but not the food I want. For her boyfriend who lives here and who is made to toil, cleaning the house, fixing leaking pipes. For Fremlin who has ventured into my thoughts as of late, unexpected.

She's there, hiding in the kick drum.

Creeping past the kitchen cabinet.

Batting at my tail.

Nosing her way through the Tubby Kat Door.

She sometimes looks as lonely as I feel. Why do long days make me wistful? I glare through the window to the Outside and dream my stupid, impotent dreams.

In neon I catch and kill rats. Swirling prisms of blood and of screaming. Trees arch into the limitless sky.

If I could climb one? I'd never stop - always moving up, up, up. Taste the clouds. Claw my way into the sun.

Burn there, alone again but purposeful. Stretched out across the horizon. Mingus-Sunset. Mingus-Glory.

Fremlin tip toes. The dogs wail with ambulance sirens. I stalk flies and imagine myself a moth.

Oh, how I'd cling to the window screen. And how I'd careen through atmosphere.

Imagine me: Breath bursting in my ribcage, extended to wing filaments - perhaps the other animals' dreams dusting my body, cascading hail cracking sidewalks, rooftops, splintering lizards into fractilized pieces.

Sometimes I hate this.

It, me, everything. Feeling like I'm waiting when I'm not, because no one is ever going to open that door for me. Only Outside brief moments I shoot past legs, through grasping hands.

Moments Outside feel like a lifetime. Like briefest dream.

I grapple with the memory. Taste of breeze. Tree limb. Mud.

The dogs get this freedom every day. They don't, however, seem to understand that which they have. Perhaps a truism for all of us, but still.

I mean, I know I have it pretty good here. Better than the lizards crushed between open window and closed. Better than ants marching for poison. Than mold sweeping its slow way across the patio.

Perhaps to be alive is to yearn. For movement. Excitement. The heat and the crash of chance, of chaos. This a type of entanglement - you and I and everyone bending to reach for the slip of a hook that will pull us up, out, away. That will us liberate.

I sound like Luco, don't I? He's been reading Sartre aloud for days and days and days. “I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”

But we do, don't we? I think we do.

And it makes my loneliness all the more bitter.

Please Meet Cousin Baby Jamie

I'm a doggy and I have a name and that name for me is Jamie. I'm a visiting dog of MR's family. These other dogs here, they call me Baby Jamie, but I'm either their age or older, so it's not really fair that they call me that; like they think I'm a baby, but I'm not. Have you ever had someone say something to you which is a thing that you're not, but they say you are anyway? That's what it's like for me, Baby Jamie, I mean: Jamie.

I would like to change my name to The Stud Jamie, but when I suggested that, they all (everyone!) laughed and chortled and basically broke my heart with their derision and my own misery which erupted like a disgusting boil.

Which isn't to say I cried. As I said earlier, I am not baby. I mean, I'm not. Look at my adult face. Look at these grownup, dewy eyes. I'm cousin Jamie. I'm a force of nature.

This is me Slipper saying hellooo because here you are meeting Baby Jamie the babyiest of all babies in babyville who sleeps with a blankie and a teddy bear and who snuggles and cuddles and coos his baby baby good mornings every morning afternoon night and in between times when his face scrunches up into a baby smile and a baby scowl he loves all hugs! Because he's a baby!

And like a baby here he is letting me eat all the snacks because I'm bigger and faster and more grown up in the way an adult is grown and can get to more food maybe I should've given it to him so he can get bigger and stronger but I was hungry when I was here in this moment in time and I couldn't imagine not chomping down on those little bison bits the meat pellets of deliciousness that I chew.

I'll let you talk to Jamie for the rest of this Internet post but remember I said hello to you and that I love you!

He calls me a baby?

You read that paragraph, right? I mean, the whole thing?

Okay.

Back to what I was saying. I'm Jamie, the Stud, a Force of Nature (it looks better capitalized, doesn't it?). Maybe I need more titles too: Jamie the Beautiful, Jamie the Interesting, Jamie the Wise, Jamie the Adorable, Captain Jamie of the Shining Seas, Jamie the Strongest Tiny Dog of All Time.

But I'm not so tiny. I'm bigger than many of the things like flowers, grass, leaves, sticks, Slipper's eyeballs, a frisbee, butterflies, and other things like that that aren't so big you can't fit them in your mouth.

My mouth is a cave I put things inside for later when I want to look at them again.

Also: I like beautiful things. I think people say weeds are weeds and not flowers because they are close minded. I think people say many things like that when they aren't thinking well.

If everyone was as good a thinker as me they would look at plants like this and think: ah, the beauty! Or in Slip's case maybe: I want to eat that!

But I've worked on not being close minded. I am Jamie the Wise, you remember? And I'm five years old or so. Ages and eons older than Slippy and Lucy. But not the cats - we don't discuss them - they have foolish cat-tendencies like not eating their own vomit and pooping all in the same place. Weird.

Call me Jamie of the Flowers.

I want to be surrounded by beauty. There is already so much pain and suffering in this world. I chase prettiness like some dogs chase tennis balls.

And I like to help people. To look in their faces and say to them, "hey, it's okay. You'll be all right." Because when I was little there wasn't someone there to say that to me, and I really want to be the one to say that to someone else who is sad or bummed out or who just feels so lonely they slouch and slink and hide behind their hair.

Slippy is right. I do love hugs. I am Jamie the Hug Machine. Jamie the Kisses You Can't Get Enough Of. Jamie Sunshine. Jamie the Doggy. The Doggy, Jamie.

And I'm your cousin too.